This is a bit of romantic adventure fiction — if anything, more like an opera libretto than a novel — in which Monfried figures mostly as narrator, with only a couple of encounters with the characters as passengers on his ship to bring him into the story, set on the coast of the Red Sea ca. 1914. The plot is loosely based on Schiller's Robbers — a young Somali blacksmith is in love with a beautiful girl, but he needs Rs. 1000 to pay off her mother. By enlisting as an askari in the French army he will get a premium of Rs. 500, which is enough to put down a deposit on his fiancée, but his evil brother is also scheming to get hold of the girl (and his brother's money). We get a delightful tale of desertion, shipwreck, identity-theft, slaving, murder, a thrilling prison escape, and much, much more.

Had this actually been written in the times when it was set, we might have been impressed with Monfried's enlightened attitude to his African characters. They are treated very straightforwardly as human beings with all the normal positive and negative qualities of human beings, who simply happen to have grown up in a different cultural, geographic and economic setting from the (presumably) European reader. Monfried knows the people he is writing about and broadly understands how they come to have certain attitudes and ways of behaving that might be quite different from "ours", and he manages to present them as people whose problems we can identify with. But of course he's writing in 1969, and by that time European writers couldn't take their right to speak on behalf of non-European characters for granted any more, so we look a bit more critically, and realise that despite his obvious affection and sympathy, he's a product of the times he grew up in, and can't help being crass and patronising from time to time. And that's before we even start on his female characters... ( )